Documentation

Changes to Existing Documentation

This has been updated to note that \p{Word} now includes code points matching the \p{Join_Control} property. The change to the property was made in Perl 5.18, but not documented until now. There are currently only two code points that match this property: U+200C (ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER) and U+200D (ZERO WIDTH JOINER).

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

Windows

Visual C++ compiler version detection has been improved to work on non-English language systems. [perl #132421]

We now set $Config{libpth} correctly for 64-bit builds using Visual C++ versions earlier than 14.1. [perl #132484]

Selected Bug Fixes

The readpipe() built-in function now checks at compile time that it has only one parameter expression, and puts it in scalar context, thus ensuring that it doesn't corrupt the stack at runtime. [perl #4574]

Fixed a use after free bug in pp_list introduced in Perl 5.27.1. [perl #131954]

Parsing a sub definition could cause a use after free if the sub keyword was followed by whitespace including newlines (and comments). [perl #131836]

The tokenizer now correctly adjusts a parse pointer when skipping whitespace in an ${identifier} construct. [perl #131949]

Accesses to ${^LAST_FH} no longer assert after using any of a variety of I/O operations on a non-glob. [perl #128263]

sort now performs correct reference counting when aliasing $a and $b, thus avoiding premature destruction and leakage of scalars if they are re-aliased during execution of the sort comparator. [perl #92264]

Some convoluted kinds of regexp no longer cause an arithmetic overflow when compiled. [perl #131893]

A NULL pointer dereference in the S_regmatch() function has been fixed. [perl #132017]

Failures while compiling code within other constructs, such as with string interpolation and the right part of s///e now cause compilation to abort earlier.

Previously compilation could continue in order to report other errors, but the failed sub-parse could leave partly parsed constructs on the parser shift-reduce stack, confusing the parser, leading to perl crashes. [perl #125351]

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.26.2 represents approximately 7 months of development since Perl 5.26.1 and contains approximately 3,300 lines of changes across 82 files from 17 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 1,800 lines of changes to 36 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.26.2:

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of perl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

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